Download PDF | Mary Whitby - Byzantines and Crusaders in Non-Greek Sources, 1025-1204 (Proceedings of the British Academy 132)-Oxford University Press (2008)
Pages : 455
الترجمة العربية | البيزنطيون والصليبيون في المصادر غير اليونانية 1025-1204
Introduction / Averil Cameron -- Pbw : The Project And The Colloquium / Michael Jeffreys -- Pilgrims And Crusaders In Western Latin Sources / Jonathan Riley-smith -- Crusader Sources From The Near East (1099-1204) / Peter Edbury -- Latin Sources And Byzantine Prosopography : Genoa, Venice, Pisa And Barcelona / Michel Balard -- The Venetian Chronicles And Archives As Sources For The History Of Byzantium And The Crusades (992-1204) / Michael Angold -- Venice : A Bibliography / Michael Angold And Michel Balard -- The South Italian Sources / Vera Von Falkenhausen -- Visitors From North-western Europe To Byzantium. Vernacular Sources : Problems And Perspectives / Krijnie Ciggaar -- Slavonic Sources / Simon Franklin -- Georgian Sources / Stephen H. Rapp, Jr. -- Armenian Sources / Tim Greenwood -- Syriac Historiographical Sources / Witold Witakowski -- Sources In Arabic / Carole Hillenbrand -- Arabic Sources For Sicily / Jeremy Johns -- Jewish Sources / Nicholas De Lange -- Jewish Sources : A Bibliography / Joshua Holo. Edited By Mary Whitby. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.
Notes on Contributors
Michael Angold is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History at the University of Edinburgh. Michel Balard is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and president of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin east.
Averil Cameron is Warden of Keble College, Oxford and former chair of the committee of the Prosopography of the Byzantine World project. Krijnie Ciggaar is actively engaged in publishing on relations between Byzantium and western Europe; she is currently working in particular on Antioch during the period 969-1268.
Nicholas de Lange is Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Cambridge and editor of the Bulletin of Judaeo-Greek Studies. Peter Edbury is a professor in the Cardiff School of History and Archaeology, University of Cardiff. Simon Franklin is Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Tim Greenwood is Lecturer in Byzantine and Eastern Christian Studies in the Department of Mediaeval History, University of St Andrews. Carole Hillenbrand is Professor of Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh.
Joshua Holo is Associate Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles, California. Michael Jeffreys is Research Manager for the Prosopography of the Byzantine World project; until 2000 he was Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Sydney Jeremy Johns is Director of the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, and Lecturer in Islamic Archaeology in the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford.
Stephen H. Rapp Jr. is Associate Professor of Medieval Eurasian and World History at Georgia State University, Atlanta, and is director of the Programin World History and Cultures. Jonathan Riley-Smith is the recently retired Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Cambridge. Vera von Falkenhausen is Professor of Byzantine History at the University di Roma Tor Vergata. Witold Witakowski is Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics and Philology, University of Uppsala, Sweden; his research interests are in the fields of Semitic studies, especially Syriac.
Preface
IT HAS BEEN A PLEASURE AND A PRIVILEGE to edit this volume. I have learned a great deal from the scholars who have contributed and have been assisted by their courteous and patient discussion with a non-specialist on numerous points of detail. I would particularly like to single out Jeremy Johns who produced the chapter on Arabic sources for Sicily with great efficiency at extremely short notice.
I have enjoyed the support of stalwart colleagues on the Prosopography of the Byzantine World project:* the original idea for this book came from Michael Jeffreys, and he and Tassos Papacostas have always been ready to listen and discuss issues. Tassos has also cheerfully provided a great deal of advice and practical help; it was he who found the striking cover image.
At an earlier stage their predecessors, John Martindale and Dion Smythe were my kindly mystagogues in the art of prosopography. Harold Short, Director of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, under whose aegis the prosopography project falls, has been consistently supportive, characteristically optimistic and always ready with a practical suggestion. In particular he offered the services of the Centre for work on the maps and put me in touch with Martyn Jessop who began the task.
The final artwork was produced by Hafed Walda, who collaborated enthusiastically with Tassos to produce excellent clear results from diverse and sometimes difficult raw materials. James Rivington, Publications Officer at the British Academy, has been upbeat and imaginative, while Colin Baldwin has been a patient copy-editor. I am grateful to Tony Eastmond for advice on a cover image, to Alicia Correa for taking on the task of compiling the index, and to George Molyneaux for meticulous checking of it.
My own work has been partly funded by a British Academy Larger Research Grant, one of many debts over a long period that the British prosopography project owes to the Academy. Finally I would like to pay tribute to Averil Cameron for firm but generous leadership, common sense and extraordinary humanity. Mary Whitby October 2006.
Introduction
THE CRUSADES HAVE ACQUIRED A NEW AND URGENT RELEVANCE in relation to the events of the past few years, as a result of which western and eastern, and indeed Christian and Muslim, relations have again become tense and uncertain. In addition, the eight hundredth anniversary in 2004 of the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 stimulated several conferences and academic essays. That event came as an enormous psychological shock to the Byzantines, who were driven from the capital city in which they had lived for nearly nine hundred years, and hardly less so to the westerners.
The Byzantines set up a court in exile at Nicaea in Asia Minor, while the crusaders were left to form a Latin government in Constantinople, the fabled capital of an ancient and prestigious empire whose riches they had desired but which they did not understand. The city's greatest treasures were looted and its most sacred relics carried off to western Europe where they served to bolster the claims of Louis IX, later St Louis, to a sacral kingship meant to evoke and surpass that of the Byzantine emperors.
This violent clash of east and west was the dramatic culmination of a tension which had been felt since before the First Crusade in 1095. The arrival of western knights in Byzantine territory on their way to the Holy Land confronted the Byzantines with a variety of difficult decisions. The Byzantine historian Anna Komnene presents us with a highly prejudiced and hostile view of the newcomers, in a narrative designed to show her father the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos in the best possible light. In fact his position was unenviable as he tried to deal with these difficult and potentially uncomfortable allies.
The story was more complex than Anna suggests; yet the fact was that from now on the Byzantines had somehow to deal with the unwelcome fact of western intrusion into their own territory, at a time when they were also experiencing encroachment by the Turks. Indeed, the Byzantine emperor himself in 1095 asked Pope Urban for help against the Seljuks, and pledged Byzantine assistance to the crusaders. However it was not solely a matter of expeditions launched in the name of religion and with the aim of recovering the Holy Land.
The Byzantine empire in this period was in practice experiencing the impact of an aggressive expansion of western Europe, which inevitably disturbed the geopolitical balance. I It is hardly surprising to find that the two sides did not understand each other. On the other hand, it is also true that the mutual hostility present in some of the contemporary sources can make it difficult to appreciate the influence and interaction which were also part of the story.
There are lessons for today in contemplating these complex and changing relationships. Recent scholarship has done something to redress the excessively western perspective of research on the period covered by the crusades.'- It has also questioned the applicability of the term `crusade' for every expedition which set out, mostly for the east, after 1095, as well as the appropriate numbering of the major crusading ventures.' However, this book goes considerably further, by showing that the issue is not simply one of west and east, Latin and Greek.4
The changes in the Islamic world clearly need to be part of the story too: the parameters of world power were changing. In order to do justice to the subject, it is necessary to realise the full complexity of the late medieval world, both eastern and western, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and this entails coming to grips with historical sources extant in a whole variety of languages. The starting-point of the book came from ongoing work on Byzantine prosopography, that is, the attempt to collect and analyse all known information about Byzantine individuals.
This is the aim of related projects in Britain and in Germany, which were set up with the aim of covering between them the whole of the Byzantine empire from AD 641 to 1261.5 As work proceeded on the British project for the period AD 1025-1261, and especially in view of contemporary events, it became clear that it was necessary to widen the scope of the research to match the enormously more complicated world in which the Byzantines found themselves, in particular the interplay between east and west that now came more sharply into relief.
Contrary to popular perceptions, the Byzantine empire was not simply a Greek empire; moreover it was surrounded and impacted on by a variety of other peoples and states. It was soon realised that no adequate, and certainly no accessible, guides existed to much of the necessary source material in other relevant languages. Thus it was necessary to commission a range of specialists who might fill this need.
The essays in this volume, all by leading scholars, present, in many cases for the first time, both overviews of particular bodies of material and detailed analytical bibliographical guides to the historical sources from particular areas or in specific languages. It would be hard to underestimate either the difficulty or the value of this undertaking. The volume provides an entirely new scholarly guide, which will at the same time serve to underline the fact that a traditionally western-centric approach to this period is no longer acceptable.
In historical writing, as well as in modern political and cultural relations, it is necessary to try to do justice to all the available evidence and perspectives. The foundations for this volume were laid by a colloquium generously hosted by the British Academy in December 2002, and organised by Professors Judith Herrin and Michael Jeffreys on behalf of the Prosopography of the Byzantine World (PBW).6 It has been edited by Dr Mary Whitby, who has been a member of the research team of PBW since 1999.
As the current chair of the committee of PBW (the change of title from Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire to Prosopography of the Byzantine World follows the principles set out above), I would like to pay tribute to Mary Whitby's skills as editor in putting together such a complex volume, with contributions by specialists in such a wide variety of fields.
I would also like to thank the British Academy once again for its support of this part of the research of the project, and indeed for its continued support of the PBW project. Lastly our thanks are again due to the Academy's Publications Committee for accepting the volume as a British Academy publication. Averil Cameron
1 P W: the Project and the ColloquiumMICHAEL JEFFREYS THE PROJECT `PROSOPOGRAPHY OF THE BYZANTINE WORLD' (PBW) appears on many of the pages of this volume, occasionally explicitly, more often by implication. PBW is a British Academy project now largely funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, though it has also recently received, after competitive application, valuable additional support from the Academy under different programmes.
The geographical limits of the project's Byzantine world are those of the great empire left by Basil II in 1025, as distinct from the shrinking limits of the actual Byzantine empire in the period under consideration. Like all projects involving the Middle East, PBW has re-examined its definitions and scope in the light of events in the first five years of the twentyfirst century: the main result of this review was the colloquium which led to this book, for which participants were asked to consider inhabitants of and visitors to the Byzantine world in the period 1025-1204.
Prosopography is the study of a defined group of people as individuals and members of families. It concentrates on personal activities and family identities, thus cutting through generalisations and stereotypes. It is a particularly valuable method of historical research for periods like that under study, when large armies are on the move in east and west and some are settling in newly conquered lands.
Some sources for the period speak of the clash of irreconcilable religions and civilisations, and it is true that two major lines on the modern cultural map were confirmed at this time-those between Muslims and Christians and between the Orthodox east of Europe and the non-Orthodox west. But it is important to compare this dimension of struggle with personal enmities and compromises, as individuals at all social levels who were caught up in the changes found ways to survive and make life tolerable, or exploited the situation to their advantage.
The mission of the PBW database is to give broad on-line access to these personalities and narratives, providing simple answers to simple questions, but also giving the opportunity to formulate and test quite complex hypotheses. A considerable shift in PBW's original focus was already plain in the planning of the colloquium. Previously it had only one centre, Byzantium. Yet the first four numbered crusades are probably the four most important events in the Byzantine world during the period from 1095 to 1204: the Fourth Crusade in fact was the greatest disaster in Byzantine history. The westerly movement of the Turks in the eleventh century is both a major destructive force for Byzantium and also (to an extent which remains controversial) a primary cause of the crusades.
Thus it would be impossible to write PBWwithout giving a very prominent place to crusading issues. All the Turkish invaders and conquerors of Asia Minor during this period, like all the western pilgrims and crusaders, were visitors to the Byzantine world, and many remained as residents. All have a place in the PBW database. The capitals of the Seljuk Turks of Konya and the Danishmendids of Niksar (Neokaisareia in Pontos) were part of that world. Of the Christian states in the east, Antioch and Edessa were within the empire of Basil II and so within PBW's definition of the Byzantine world, though Jerusalem and much of Tripolis had not been recovered after being lost to the first Arab expansion of the seventh century.
Yet many events in the history of Jerusalem directly concerned Byzantium, or involved travellers who used (and abused) Byzantine roads and harbours to reach there, or included residents of the Byzantine world from Antioch or Edessa, or showed Jerusalem residents active inside that world, in Antioch or Edessa to Jerusalem's north.
Only details of the history of Jerusalem which were purely internal or involved those to its east and south are not strictly Byzantine. From the perspective of 2002-5 it makes no sense to prepare a prosopography which covers ninety per cent of crusading activity in the east without adding the last ten per cent. The crusaders were thus included in the colloquium title. Some speakers were invited to address crusading history directly, others to make it a part of their presentations on other groups of sources.
The inclusion of Tripolis and Jerusalem in the Byzantine world was an arbitary yet natural corollary, and it has clear positive results. Byzantium, the major regional power of 1025, is the only sizeable platform available fromwhich to survey the crusading period with a degree of impartiality between polarised eastern and western viewpoints. Admittedly Byzantiumwas staunchly Christian, but it lost many eastern provinces to the Muslim Turks in the eleventh century, while its capital and some western provinces fell to the crusaders in 1204, so that it came to look on both these enemies with equal horror.
There was always tension between Orthodox Byzantines and the non-Orthodox crusaders, especially near Constantinople. Participants in the colloquium were asked to assess the importance for the Byzantine and crusader world of the particular sources they were invited to discuss. The geographical extent of that world had been defined as the limits of Basil II's empire of 1025, but the criteria for membership of this Byzantine world became a major theme of the colloquium. Some speakers produced explicit advice on the problems posed by their sources or populations; others described their material in a more general way, leaving PBW to work out its policies accordingly.
Among articles giving direct advice may be mentioned those on Armenian and Georgian sources, where rulers and aristocratic groups often had parallel Byzantine identities; on southern Italy, where Byzantine forms were taken over as markers of distinction for a decidedly non-Byzantine Norman nobility; on visitors from northern Europe, some of whom served as mercenaries of Byzantium; and on Slavic lands, where an ecclesiastical hierarchy centred on Constantinople (and including some confirmed Greek-speakers) may be seen partially to byzantinise a population which in other respects cannot be described as Byzantine. The above comments may help to explain the scope of this volume and the different emphases of different chapters. It may also be of interest to set out the conclusions PBW drew from the papers and from the extensive discussion which occurred in the framework of the colloquium.
The first and most obvious was a clear imperative to aim at the inclusion of sources other than those in Greek, together with some Latin and a limited representation from other languages-the texts for whose study PBW was originally funded. Special importance should be given to Arabic sources, because of their large numbers and their political importance, both in the medieval period and in the twenty-first century. An application to the Leverhulme Trust has in fact now enabled the funding of a sister project to PBW, devoted to Arabic sources.
The second was a need to present the actual project within the perspective of a wider ideal project covering all the sources in all available languages. PBW should publish results in a framework to contrast that ideal with the partial work which had been funded and achieved. A good deal of time has in fact been spent in the construction of chronological tables to show the sources read and those (from the ideal project) not yet studied. These tables will form one of the points of entry to the prosopography.
The third was a response to the extreme difficulty of making a binary division between possible candidates for a place in the prosopography, finding secure definitions to include some in the Byzantine world and exclude others. Outside the central area of Byzantium, the Byzantine identity of most individuals is best assessed as a point on a continuum of possibilities rather then decided simply in the positive or negative.
The solution to this problem, reached in discussions at the colloquium, has been to convert this theoretical problem into a practical issue of timetabling the work. The boundaries of the Byzantine world have been set very wide, including those with even slight claims to membership and hence giving greater flexibility. Then work on the prosopography can be prioritised to move approximately from the secure identifications to the insecure, following the guidelines set out in this volume.
Finally, the colloquium suggested the metaphor of an umbrella for the overall form to be adopted by the prosopography. The umbrella would consist of different-sized panes of cloth spreading out from a single point of definition, the Byzantine world. Each pane would represent one (or sometimes more) of the categories of sources represented by the chapters of this book.
Each would demand different skills (especially languages and cultural sensitivities), and would become a distinct project or project module. At the same time, all the modules together would make up a single large-scale enterprise, an integrated whole to be consulted for fully rounded answers to users' questions. PBW is now approaching the end of the Greek pane of the umbrella, with some contributions to others.
At the same time it is seeking to encourage and facilitate a concerted attempt to complete the other panes. In this endeavour its researchers will be among the first and most avid readers of this excellent book. The progress of the project will be recorded on the PBW website, where it is also proposed in due course tomaintain updated versions of the bibliographies in this volume
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